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Following a worldwide outage last Friday, the world’s largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s, squashed claims that a cyber attack was to blame.
On Friday (15 March), McDonald’s restaurants in Australia, Japan, the UK, and New Zealand suffered outages, which caused them to close, with restaurants in Germany, Austria, Hong Kong, and Canada also suffering issues.
The outages reportedly related to a third party responsible for payment processing. However, McDonald’s has since said that services have been restored.
Despite concerns that a cyber attack may have been the cause, McDonald’s has denied this being the case, simply calling the issue a “technology outage”.
Dear customers,
— McDonald’s Australia (@maccas) March 15, 2024
Earlier today, we experienced a technology outage which impacted all of our restaurants.
This wasn’t related to a cybersecurity event and most restaurants have now re-opened and are serving up all your faves.
A huge thank you to our customers and our…
The issue reportedly occurred as the result of a configuration change with the third-party provider.
“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers,” said McDonald’s global chief information officer Brian Rice.
“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it.
“Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
McDonald’s is currently in the process of moving to Google Cloud as one of its technology providers, having previously announced a partnership that will see its systems moved to into the cloud and increase the efficiency of kiosk ordering and more.
The fast-food chain iterated that the outage was not related to its move to Google Cloud.